It's funny you say that because making the various menu items seems like the biggest challenge in my view.

In my experience, a restaurant with a large menu is a sure sign of mediocre food. It's like when you order Thai cuisine at a Chinese restaurant - you end up getting sweet and spicy Chinese food.

When you have so many menu items, how do you ensure consistency and train cooks how to prepare the recipes?

From my experience accidentally ordering from some of these places, the answer seems to be “you don’t.”

I’m not opposed to the idea of ghost kitchens in theory, but in practice, the food is almost always mediocre and the costs are designed around being able to profit alongside the fee-laden third-party delivery service model.

That means optimizing your food and labor costs and spamming a million different types of restaurants so you can try to attract a wide swath of customers.

For the end user, it means paying a ridiculous premium (especially once all the delivery fees, city-specific fees (at least with Uber Eats in Seattle), handling fees, driver tip) to get poor-quality food that definitely tastes like it went from freezer to flash fryer, delivered — and usually delivered lukewarm at best. No thanks.

Restaurants are already suffering right now and I’m sympathetic to actual kitchens who are trying to traverse a pandemic while also being fleeced by external delivery companies (it is unrealistic for most non-pizza restaurants outside of a densely populated area like New York City to employ their own drivers/bike delivery folks), particularly since I don’t cook — but as a consumer, I avoid all ghost kitchens at all costs. If I’m going to pay too much for delivery, I want it to at least be real food.

The long term answer is likely automation. (Same answer as Lyft and Uber)

My guess is short term it’s a matter of checklists with largely common underlying ingredients. Or perhaps everything is prepackaged and unfrozen upon order. (The larger the menu, the more likely the former)

We already have this automation. You can find it in the pre-packaged entrees section of your grocery store’s freezer aisle. The problem is that outside of a few limited categories, most people find frozen pre-prepared food to be unsatisfactory when compared to fresh food. So the concern is that automation may just mean “supermarket-quality food becomes the norm, while all the real restaurants go out of business”.

So that would mean people prefer lower quality food for lower prices over mid-to-high quality food at higher prices, and society gets what it wants. Win-win.

If there's demand for higher quality food, then I'm confident the doomsday scenario of "all the real restaurants go out of business" is not going to happen. We just might have to wait a little longer for delivery or travel a few more minutes to get to such a place.

If you think that "people prefer lower quality food for lower prices" == "society gets what it wants, win-win", I suggest you take a look at any 1970s cookbook. This country spent years wiping out local bakeries and butchers and replacing them with factory foods. It was a dire time, and we're lucky today to have so many better options.

This Twitter account gives you a fun look at what we don't have to deal with anymore, thank god: https://twitter.com/70s_party?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcam...

ETA: In case this isn't clear, what I'm trying to say is that sometimes powerful economic forces can provide us with deeply suboptimal results. It would be an objectively bad thing if every good pizza place in my city went out of business and got replaced with Freschetta. But it really could happen.

> It would be an objectively bad thing if every good pizza place in my city went out of business and got replaced with Freschetta

That would just mean that the people prefer Freschetta. It's not like it's going to replace every single good pizza place by getting little to nobody's business, in your scenario where it replaces all restaurants it's going to get all the business because everyone wants lower priced shitty frozen pizza; and that's why these thought experiments are a stretch.

As long as there's still people willing to pay more for a better pizza, there will still be kitchens providing them, and if no one's doing it, that is your cue to open or invest in one and get some of that business yourself.

> When you have so many menu items, how do you ensure consistency and train cooks how to prepare the recipes?

usually when a restaurant has a large menu, each dish is just some combination of a relatively small set of ingredients. like if you go to a typical pizza/sub place, they'll have a cheesesteak, steak sub (cheesesteak with no chees), italian cheesesteak (cheesesteak with marinara sauce), and a chicken cheesesteak. each will be available with your choice of toppings, most of which are also ingredients for the salad options or toppings for pizza. the total number of combinations is huge, but it's really not hard to consistently make a bunch of variations on the same core idea. chinese takeout is the same deal; three or four protein options combined with a bunch of different sauces/vegetables. having a large menu shows a lack of creativity/focus, but the way they're constructed makes it pretty easy to train cooks how to make them consistently.

White label food.

It does rather defeat Yelp or other attempts at reviews if "restaurants" can be spun up and down like AWS VMs. I suppose the limit case would be personalised restaurants, where everyone thinks they're ordering from a slightly different customised-for-them place but which all come from the same kitchen.

I guess the parasocial relationships are the next thing to automate?

> White label food.

Already had those -- the frozen-grill trend of the 90s, aka the TGIFridays, Bennigan's, Applebees, etc. With COVID they just ditched sit-down part and went straight to delivery.

Sysco and US Foods already offer dishes for restaurants to white label. These establishments are just pulling those multi-restaurant offerings from the distributor to the retailer

https://www.sysco.com/Products/Products/Product-Categories.h... https://www.usfoods.com/great-food.html

>is there a wall of iPads so each "restaurant" front gets all its own orders on one? does whatever company that facilitates this kind of thing provide a solution where manifold orders can come in on a more traditional kitchen display system with some flag added for which "restaurant" it belongs to?

The latter. Chowly, Deliverect, etc are solutions to manage the plethera of tablets.

interesting!

>I don't know if I believe that this is a problem

It's just another one of the ways life is getting a tiny bit harder. Before if "Fire Ass Thai" sucked then I won't order from them again and I'd try "Panang Panang! Thai Curry" next time. Now I gotta put the effort into disentangling this web of restaurants to find one that might not suck.

Forty-odd years ago, one saw in Denver establishments calling themselves "Italian/Mexican" restaurants. I understood this to mean "lots of tomato sauce, with degrees of heat." I did not bother to try any of them.